DONNA LADD

Give Dissent a Chance

It wasn't Dan Rather's tears on Letterman that bothered me.
I probably would have cried, too, after what he'd been through. It'd
be unnatural not to. It was the network anchor's unabashed jingoism
that got me. Why did the terrorists attack the US? Letterman asked.
"Well, because they're evil," Rather answered, adding that they're
also "jealous" of the United States. I looked at my partner with
shock. This from one of the stalwarts of journalism? "I never thought
I'd say this, but I miss 'objective' journalism," I told him. At
least you usually get two, albeit often superficial, sides. No
longer.

I'm sure no fan of US corporate journalism, the type that that is
so blinded by Ivy-League geography that it misses a major cultural
divide in the country. The type that ignores poor and minority
concerns because their readers have higher incomes. The type that
doesn't bother to leave the horserace long enough to research the
well-established meaning of "compassionate conservatism." The type
that packages every tragedy with neat little gross banners like
"America's New War." It's so often painful to watch journalists --
myself included -- try to evenly box a complex issue into "he said
that, and she responded," while hiding their personal biases and
holding back needed analysis in the name of fairness. I heartily
agree with Molly Ivins, as she once told the Twin Citian:
"I've seen truth murdered too many times in the name of
objectivity."

But in the week since the hijacking tragedies, amid my mourning
for a city I love and victims I didn't know, I increasingly fear that
we're not going to be there for you. As a group, I fear we're going
to be there for the state, which in our collective grief and
flag-buying sprees we've all temporarily decided is one and the same
as the people. But it's not -- and the US, now more than ever,
desperately needs the press to monitor and expose military excesses,
to protect our civil liberties, to relay pleas for the sanctity of
innocent life, American or not. Perhaps because the media elite
capital was ground zero of the tragedy, many press outlets and
journalists seem to have already chosen sides (and bought that you
must totally be with the state or with the terrorists, as Bush says),
plastering American flags all over their marketing banners, ignoring
the growing peace movement and berating any attempts at dissent. Our
corporate media, predictably perhaps, is quickly becoming our state
media, stoking blind patriotism in a country that doesn't need help
right now channeling anger toward the Middle East.

I've been shocked at responses from some journalists I've heard in
the past week. As a graduate of Columbia J-school, I've been privy to
angry comments on our class e-mail discussion list, censorious
carping I thought I'd never hear from fellow reporters. Tellingly,
the salvos came over the basic question of whether we -- journalists
and Americans in general -- should try to understand why extremist
Muslims would attack the US (beyond Rather's evil and jealous
distillation, that is). Over the weekend, one graduate sent around a
mordant opinion piece from London's The Guardian, saying in
the accompanying e-mail simply, "Perhaps this will provide some
insight and a different perspective." In the piece, Seumas Milne
wrote that "Americans simply don't get it." If we cannot face our own
history and treatment of people in other countries that might have
led to the tragedy, he warned we will face more such terrorism, with
perhaps worse consequences.

Agree with Milne's specifics or not, it is rather obvious right
now that Americans hold revisionist illusions about much of our own
history and are scant willing to admit, much less repent for, our own
crimes. (Witness our shameful exit from the Durban racism conference
and that Confederate flag still flying over my home state). As
journalists, we all should hold ourselves responsible for our past
(and perhaps present) willingness to de-emphasize our own
international education and reporting and focusing on what will sell
to the American public. I've sure done it, writing way too many
glowing words about the high-tech boom in order to make a living. But
too many journalists (or their bosses) don't seem to want to even
hear an alternative point of view. They want no dissent in the wake
of this tragedy. And, most terrifying, some are willing to skewer the
messenger of any challenge to the patriotic status quo.

One grad fired back to the journalist who forwarded the piece:
"What sort of 'insight' do you think you are providing? ... That
knowledge doesn't temper the urge to put our collective foot in the
responsible group's ass." He/she finishes, "[K]eep your
schmucky agenda to yourself." Another: "When I'm gassed in the
streets during the next attack, I'll take comfort in knowing that the
evils of global capitalism, European colonialism and Richard Nixon
are to blame." Still another, filled with expletives: "F**k that,
f**k Milne, and f**k anyone who would pay such pointless navel-gazing
any mind right now."

This media jingoism wasn't limited to my fellow J-school grads.
Over on Jim Romanesko's media site (medianews.org), where the
navel-gazing can reach obscene proportions, New York Post
columnist Andrea Peyser drew cheers and boos when she toed the same
line as Rather, dismissing the notion that US citizens should
understand why much of the world hates us. "Like hell. We know why we
are hated only too well. We are hated by those who are jealous and
resentful of our freedom and prosperity. They hate us because we
rightly support the state of Israel. They hate us because we are
everything they are not," she wrote.

Of course, New York journalists are going to have extreme
reactions to what they're seeing: They're human, and this act was
horrifying. As Americans, they want justice. I do, too. But this
xenophobia can quickly turn into reporting that won't question
anything Bush, Ashcroft and new terrorism czar Tom Ridge do -- both
abroad and to our own civil liberties at home -- toward the noble
goal of ending all evil. The networks and many newspapers have
blatantly lined up behind the idea of an all-out "war" against a
still-unknown enemy beyond bin Laden, a war that we may lose (guess
we shouldn't pay much mind to the Soviet experience in Afghanistan,
either). In general, the media are helping perpetuate the callow
notion that Americans will crusade into bad Arab states on Wild West
horseback, guns firing, take out the evil guys, and we'll all feel
better once we've snuffed out as many eyes as they did. That scenario
is as naïve as the idea that terrorism was never going to find
its way to our arrogant shores in the first place. How can any of us
rest if we kill starving, innocent Afghans in the process?

On this treacherous road we're traveling, the media an the whole
seem to accept that anything must go in the American quest for
revenge; there are no other roads to justice. In these days of
conglomerates and watered-down journalism, it's certainly hard to
fathom a hearty fight by media outlets to, say, publish the
21st-century version of the Pentagon Papers. Mighty muckraker I. F.
Stone liked to say, "All journalism is investigative." At the rate
we're going now, no journalism will be investigative. Dissent will be
a relic of the past.

Donna Ladd is a writer in Jackson, Miss. E-mail her at
donna@shutup101.com.